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A study of school design has discovered that school design can influence a child’s development by as much as 25 percent—over the course of an academic year. The 751 pupils using 34 classrooms across seven primary schools in Blackpool were studied by the University of Salford. Standardized data—such as age, gender(性别) and academic performance—were collected on each child at the start and end of the year, while each classroom was evaluated for quality on ten different environmental factors, such as direction for natural light, shape, color and temperature.

The results, published in Building and the Environment, showed that the architecture and design of classrooms has an important role to play in influencing academic performance. Six of the environmental factors—color, choice, connection, complexity, flexibility and light—were clearly correlated with grade scores.

Architect Peter Barrett, the study’s head author, said, “This is the first time a whole assessment has been made that successfully links the overall impact directly to learning rates in schools. The impact identified is in fact greater than we imagined.” According to the results, once the differences between the “worst” and “best” designed classrooms in the study were taken into account, it was found that the influence that “best” designed classrooms bring is equivalent(相等的) to the progress that a typical pupil would be expected to make over a year.

The results are particularly interesting as the government has introduced a controversial series of standardized templates(模板) for new school buildings, with the purpose of reducing the costs of hiring architects. The opinion on a range of strictly-defined design features replaces the previous Labour government’s more architecturally luxurious Building Schools for the Future program, which was canceled by education secretary Michael Gove. He has claimed that his department’s new Priority School Building Program, and its basic plans, will put an end to a situation which he believes existed only to “make architects richer”.